Remedy Z: Solo (29 page)

The final 5 were a mix of people. There were a couple of labourers “Hi Viz 2 and 3” and a cyclist I named “Lance”. My mind raced and calculated, my naming and coping mechanisms kept me cool. I took in the image of two horrors; once ladies. I called the first "Dolly", and it wasn’t because of red lips or platinum hair, and “Miss Muffet”, a dark-haired zombie that had once been a young woman with a spider tattoo on her shoulder. These characters were to be fought in a confined space and could be the death of me. I had to focus on succeeding, using the confined space to my advantage and winning. It was grim, though.

I made a horrible choice at that moment. I decided to let the Mouse take the brunt of their attention while I hacked them apart, one-by-one. I would not run or escape but that was the only gift and chance that he was survive. “Sorry Mouse!” I whispered and wiped rancid blood from my face with the back of my hand. 

My quick glance to him confirmed he was in a very bad way and he would be a burden to my survival. He was screaming, being feasted upon and may never pull through.

“You’re making the right choice, buddy,” I said to myself as the weight of the situation and the life of another rested on my shoulders. The Mouse would be sacrificed so that I could live. I had a plan and I would survive, like I always had.

First, Lance would be taken-out, he was being crowded out at the back while the others feasted on the Mouse. I decided to chop his legs at the Achilles Tendons. I severed both savagely and it dropped, without a whimper. It just gnashed its teeth a little and made bubbling with its mouth like a goldfish. The end was savage as I brought Ebony crashing down on the base of his spine. I wanted to test my theory that the control centre for Divine was there. Sure enough, Lance was gone. No wounds to his head. “You can ponder this later; get on with it!” I said to myself as I levered the machetes out of Lance.  Miss Muffet and Hi Viz 2 were alerted and turned to face me. Hi Viz 2 was a big boy and his turn towards me was accompanied by an unexpected rain of fists. My hands went up to block the strikes but the force sent me backwards. I stumbled back and tripped over Lance’s still body (the cyclist-looking zombie I had felled earlier).

Miss Muffet lurched forward and landed on top of me. She began snapping with jagged teeth. Miss Muffet had once been a comely counter-culture woman in her twenties, with tattoos, piercings and the dark eyes and cosmetic tattoos that gave her dark lips as well.  In her day, she was every Goth and counter-culture teen’s zombie or vampire fantasy. It was no fantasy, rather a nightmare that I needed to end. In a split-second, I knew I had to get her off me and be ready for the next onslaught of Hi Viz 2 or I would be a goner. With legs pushing, I turned my hips and rolled on top of the snapping zombie. It bit my forearm as I used its hair to hold it to the floor. I instinctively flinched but held on I pulled Orion from his sheath as my machetes had clattered to the floor when I fell. The blade of my big proud German hunting knife was brought down with extreme force, splitting its forehead almost in two.

Suddenly, I knew something was off; surreal feelings and the awareness of my surroundings had changed.  My world was rocked and I rolled and slumped to the left. I was in a daze. I knew that Hi Viz 2 was nearby and guessed he clobbered me in some way. I was in a bad patch. I had vision reminiscent of an old analogue television without good reception. There was an image of the world but it was unclear. I could taste my own blood or someone else’s. It didn’t matter, everything was fast and slow and my hearing was gone.

I saw the form of Hi-Viz 2 and lashed-out feebly with my knife, striking something. My attack would not have been a killing blow, by any stretch of the imagination, but I saw the zombie fall and somewhat fall apart. My senses were even further dazzled when I realised my ears were ringing.

There was a momentary deafness; someone was shooting or had shot. My mind raced; “Did the Mouse get them off him and land a few rounds? Who else was here?” As I faded into some semi-conscious state, I saw a vision of sorts.

 There was a silhouette of someone standing in the entrance of the courtyard and then I must have blacked out. It was the last moment of that time that I remembered. “Had I seen a ghost?”

It must have been a moment between losing consciousness and regained my lucidity. I could see the writhing bodies of Dolly and Hi Viz 3 feasting on a bloody mass that had once been the Mouse. Inexplicably dead, and near to me, was Hi Viz 2. Its head, part of its shoulder and an arm was largely missing and messed up. Orion was still stuck in the skull of Miss Muffet and my machetes were still lying on the floor where they had been left during the melee.

The silhouette, the person or the shape of a person was either long gone or never there. I was on my own and would have to get into it. The zombies were satisfied I wasn’t a threat and had continued to feed on the Mouse. It would not be too much longer until I was dessert, however. They never forget about a prone, next meal.

I slowly commando crawled over to the body and retrieved Orion from the skull of Miss Muffet. I wiped the blade clean of the sticky, rancid zombie blood so my knife would function at its best again. 

Everything hurt and I felt sick. I had had this once before; mild concussion and a touch of shock. I had gone unnoticed though, and took a moment to shake off the malaise. I picked up the first machete, Ebony and then the second, Bob. I breathed carefully to get myself ready and then I rose, like a great cat on the African plane I pounced and brought one blade down on Hi-Viz 3’s skull. Dolly received a killing blow from Ebony in the lower back. Both were gone and so was the Mouse.

Whoever the Mouse was, I had unwittingly been his nemesis. He was a mess; no clearly defined clothing or body shape was evident other than one intact hand and foot. He was essentially a pile of meat, his head had imploded. Strangely, he had held onto that 9mm pistol till the very end. “Merry Christmas Mouse,” I said wearily as I prized the pistol from his intact hand. “A gift that would keep on giving,” I smiled as I looked at the gore covered pistol. In the mess of rags and flesh were a couple of magazines that had once been in his pockets. They were covered in filth, but with a clean-up they would mean additional ammunition for my new close-quarters capability. 

“Rock and roll, Jesse” I said to myself, regarding the pistol that had once been the sidearm of the brave policewoman. I wasn’t quite right and together and I was beginning to realise I had been rocked with something heavy duty. As my head cleared and I considered what had just happened, I thought the simple task of cleaning that gore-covered pistol was a good test of my faculties. I tore off some rags from the fallen and feebly began the task.  

The rag was used and worked quickly to wipe the 9-mil and its magazine clean. I tried to spit onto the pistol to bring some mobilising fluid to the “cleaning” process but my mouth was so dry I came up with nothing. I worked at it anyway. My work didn’t render the pistol completely clean but it was good enough and proved I wasn’t too badly damaged by the whole encounter. Operating mechanically, I released the magazine in the pistol and cleared a round from the chamber to ensure and what I saw perplexed me. There was only one round missing from the magazine; the shot that brought the zombies here. “What the?” 

It was possible that a round had been manually loaded first and the magazine was not drawn upon until the second shot. But that took preparation and was highly unlikely. Mouse couldn’t hit the side of a barn and he missed me at close range; no evidence he would have thought to load the firearm in a special way. 

“What the fuck had just happened?” I asked aloud.  What, indeed, as I noticed blood, my red, clean human blood seeping from my neck and shoulder from some small holes. My head hurt and my body began to ache all over. The Endorphins of battle were wearing off and a general malaise and nausea brought me low. I could see that I had a number of wounds and I needed to get to a safe place to sort myself out and work out what the hell was going on.

As I walked and stumbled a little, the survivor in me pushed me to check and recheck for any more zombies. After a full sweep of the area, into the carpark and back to where I had parked the truck, all was still and calm. While I was sure they weren’t the last zombies in Tantangara, I was confident that I had just mopped up one of the few little groups that still wandered around. The fact I was standing there, after so many gunshots and the melee that ensued, was testament to largely clear status that could be attributed to the town. I dragged the bodies out into the carpark, alongside the existing pile, and built a pile of my own. Mouse didn’t deserve any special treatment; the idiot’s remains were piled with the other bodies. I went back to the truck and got some hose to help siphon fuel from an old car in the carpark. I looked around nervously as the fuel tank gave me its last resources, spilling petrol into an old water-cooler container I had found next to some rubbish skips. The fuel glugged out of the container as I poured it all over the corpses. Some light caught it in all its glory; glistening and beckoning me to release its power. The smell was almost overpowering and I needed to step away or risk passing out again. Just a small match was ignited and thrown at the funeral pyre. The naked little flame triggered significant force that engulfed all the bodies in an instant. As the fire burned, I considered the strange happening that led me to survive. The fire stimulated my mind and I felt my ability to think, at the very least, had improved. Thoughts of ghosts, saviours and hallucinations went through my mind. I concluded I had hallucinated and must have killed the zombies myself. There was no other logical explanation at the time. As the corpses sizzled, the smell of rancid meat cooking reminded me a little too much of Tanny Hill and I retreated into the relative shelter of the courtyard.

I scanned the shopping centre courtyard for anything else that could have been useful. Most useful items had been looted or damaged beyond utility. There was nothing too much of use left. I did find a winter beanie and a feather-down vest in olive drab colour that would come with me. 

As my head cleared a little and I went back outside, I began to analyse the situation. “Who was it I had seen in the entrance?” I questioned. The hallucination theory had been my conclusion but it just wasn’t sitting right. Nothing made complete sense and I could not find the four-wheel drive utility that I had seen driving around.  That vehicle added to the mystery of what had happened. It seemed strange that someone that didn’t expect company would have hidden the vehicle and walked in here. My head was better but still foggy so I made an analysis and stuck with it.

“I must have been seeing things.” I decided. I was seeing ghosts in that ghost town; but were they real?

Chapter 15: The Book Judged By Its Cover

It was time to go to Samsonov’s house; to get weapons and ammunition as part of my new plans. I was on a mission to explore Cooleman, to find out what was going on there. The questions cycled through my head “who is the enigmatic Doctor Kian Penfould?” and “when, where and how can I find like-minded people to live alongside me in the post-apocalyptic world?”

“Would Cooleman mean the future or my end?” I asked myself in finality. Only time and endeavour would provide that answer. It seemed a small but complex mission to go there and I had little time to think through all the revelations and implications of the prior few days. All I knew was that I had just made some dangerous enemies in my attempt to find new friends.

“Maybe I should have just stayed at home?” On the surface, my plan to go into the belly of the beast was self-destructive but I had to think broader and deeper than my own mortality.

Cold hard survival was a crutch and I began to justify the situation in its aid of survival. Materially, I had indeed found a pistol and some winter gear for my troubles. But psychologically, I wished I had not ventured there. There was a message in those events; the image of the Mouse gesturing to his bullet-wound and chanting “Cooleman.” A quick flashback of the scene, the fight, the horror and the silhouette. It was so vivid and then gone to reveal a lonely, swaying pine surrounded by gum trees on the shores behind me. 

I sat inside the truck and turned the engine over. As I revisited the memory of the Mouse and his gesturing, I found myself whispering “Cooleman”. I knew I had to go there, despite the danger. I needed to know about the people there, the helicopter and make contact with any good folk still out there. 

I had to think of the region, of what I owed the Samurai (life), the future of Australia and perhaps the world. The seeds of doubt were there and diminished when above that pine, I saw the image of a Sea Eagle in my rear-vision mirror, circling majestically over Lake Tantangara. The bird of prey had its flight feathers out and was surveying, scanning and exploring for new prey, in pursuit of the next generation of chicks that I imagined were warm and snug in a rocky eerie somewhere. “You’re the Eagle Jess; make a next generation, make the effort. Find people, look after them, make it happen or die alone,” I told myself. It was a short but salient moment in my life. I got out of the idling truck and turned to view the true image of the eagle, with my own eyes. It was what it seemed. It dove, grabbing a fish from the glistening waters and flew off to feed the future. I would be the eagle.  

I got back in the truck and resolved that I would not get distracted again; I would stay on-mission, unlike the unnecessary side visit into Tantangara’s centre of town which had cost one life and almost my own. The eagle had inspired me and gave me more energy than food. I was moving again and my mind was given some ease. 

The truck warmed up, without issue, and I began the short drive back to the roundabout. As I drove on auto-pilot, I had an additional take-away from those events, a burden. That burden was the death of a survivor and the haunting mystery of what had happened; the silhouette that I believed was a ghost in my head. “What was that?” I asked myself as I reached the windward side of Tantangara, where Samsonov’s house was situated.